2013 BURY THE DEAD RETREAT
Two of my community members and I recently had the opportunity to travel to the Pacific Northwest for the Bury the Dead book release and retreat with Word and World. Three middle-class, suburban, post-Evangelical native Southern Californians who recently started living communally, we were eager for how this experience might inspire and stimulate ongoing conversation for our own fledgling community.
How might we continue living into our vision of being a “Manna and Mercy” people, struggling to take root amidst Southern Orange County affluence, denial of death, and hyper-individualist pursuit of the American Dream? We long to live into an alternative Way: to be nurtured by an economy of abundance and interdependence with each other and the land, in contrast to the pervasive economy of scarcity, consumeristic addiction, waste, and a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality that has deeply shaped each one of us since birth.
That said, getting the chance to rub shoulders with a diverse smattering of participants within the deeply rooted network of Word and World, all living alternatively and creatively within their own death-dealing contexts of post-industrial North American empire was rich & rewarding—it gave us a unique opportunity to engage more deeply with issues of our life together, most poignantly, the rituals and stories we tell around death and dying.
How might we continue living into our vision of being a “Manna and Mercy” people, struggling to take root amidst Southern Orange County affluence, denial of death, and hyper-individualist pursuit of the American Dream? We long to live into an alternative Way: to be nurtured by an economy of abundance and interdependence with each other and the land, in contrast to the pervasive economy of scarcity, consumeristic addiction, waste, and a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality that has deeply shaped each one of us since birth.
That said, getting the chance to rub shoulders with a diverse smattering of participants within the deeply rooted network of Word and World, all living alternatively and creatively within their own death-dealing contexts of post-industrial North American empire was rich & rewarding—it gave us a unique opportunity to engage more deeply with issues of our life together, most poignantly, the rituals and stories we tell around death and dying.
From the time we landed at SeaTac we were showered with hospitality from the Tacoma Catholic Worker, whose members not only got us to and from the airport, but also gave us a tour of important peace and justice initiatives within the wider Tacoma community. After being well-fed with a hearty meal of homemade soups and bread, this All Saint’s Day weekend retreat was kicked off by a night of readings from some of the contributors to Bury the Dead. With altars and offerendas surrounding us, we were accompanied by both our loved ones who had recently died, as well as that great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us along this Way.
I immediately found myself swept up into a torrent of undifferentiated emotion as Lydia Wylie-Kellermann read about the intimate experience of sitting for one last time in her mother’s lap, weeping before carefully washing her body, a skill her own body intuitively “knew” how to do in this shocking moment of death. The way her words leapt off the page and made time stand still reminded me, just two years prior, of the three precious, tortured and poignant weeks my family spent accompanying my own father in dying. The anguish. The tenderness. The disbelief. The intimacy. The anger. The wailing.
And the stories kept coming. A time of communal honoring and grief, transparent emotion, vivid story-telling and prophetic truth-telling, all birthed from the deep pain of refusing to turn away from death’s ugly face. This was a circle where we could bring our pain, our repressed and forgotten stories, our unresolved grief. This was a place that would not flinch or turn away in the face of deathliness. This might be a place where we could bury our dead…or at least learn some rhythms and rituals that could get us closer.
The rest of the weekend continued in this vein, providing us with rich times for reflection through Bible study, altar building, and experiential workshops. A few personal highlights: being witness to one participant’s courageous, raw, and beautiful expression of grief through dance; getting to work out some of my own unresolved “clinging” with my Dad in working with clay; having the rare opportunity for extended times of deep sharing, listening, and crying with my housemates; getting to be witness to countless stories of losing loved ones to various forms of both interpersonal and institutional violence; and finally, being given unhindered, sacred space to sit with death. The beautiful natural setting of the Seabeck Retreat Center was forthcoming with boundless inspiration for re-membering the natural cycle of death and re-birth all around us, inviting us to re-place ourselves and the stories of our loved ones within this larger, more ancient story.
The altar-building and candlelit altar walk we participated in the last night capped off the weekend beautifully. What a gift to mourn those we have lost with such intentionality, honesty, reverence, and physical involvement. No doubt my Dad was honored by the placement and thoughtfulness of my altar, and the deep listening and communal song we all shared, but moreso, it was I who was given the rarer gift. This process of communal mourning, so neglected and forgotten within a culture drowning in the endless demand for increased productivity and accumulation, gifted me immeasurably. Increased presence, clarity, peace, light, strength, connectedness. These are a few of the precious intangible gifts the dead can offer us.
However, like the women who went to anoint Jesus’ dead body, we too, must go boldly to the places of death in our lives. If we can muster the courage, the dead, along with the land that holds them, will tenderly embrace us, wipe our tears, and whisper to us the rhythms of life and wisdom we need to live more faithfully into this cross-carrying, death-confronting way of Jesus. Unlike the stingy and punitive powers of death, the dead offer themselves to us in a way that we might be nurtured into new life.
I am deeply grateful to Word and World for creating a space where I could commune with my Dad in this way. For creating an environment conducive to both critical analysis around death, as well as for vulnerable and courageous communal sharing. A place where women and men from all walks of life could come and share their stories, where no one would flinch, and where all our dead could be honored. This was truly a place where the rhythms of death and Resurrection might force their way into our marrow and lay claim on our previously occupied flesh…washing away our numbness, our isolation, our fear, our anxiety, our many defenses and making way for new life…should we, like the women at the tomb, unwittingly stumble upon it.
Contributed by Lindsay Airey, Tacoma, Washington, Seabeck Retreat Center.